Please help...advice on wire/cable

[Iwinulose287]

Hi everyone. Im new to the home theater world, and am looking for some basic direction or advice on what wire/cables to use to hook all of my equipment up. I've attempted to read the post on this site, but cant understand the audio-lingo. I've researched blue jean cable, but again cant decipher the wire code. My equipment is as follows:

Samsung LN46A530 46" LCD TV
Yamaha RX-V663 receiver
Mirage Nanosat 5.1 surround sound
PS3

My questions are, what kind of speaker wire should i get, and what kind of HDMI cable do i need and how many. Im not looking for any high end products, just something that will do the job well.

Thank you for your assistance.

 

[Adam]

Welcome to the forum!

Let's start with speaker wire. IMO, you just want a good electrical conductor like copper. You can spend a lot of cash on fancy speaker cables, or you can use lamp cord - you'll get the same results if the cables are the same size. Check out the site at the link here (or the simpler Crutchfield tutorial here) for recommendations on what size of cable to get, depending on the impedance of your speakers and how long your cables will be. 12-gauge will be more than fine for most everyone. I run 16-gauge to my rear speakers. Still have questions? Let us know how long your cables will be, and we'll get you hooked up.

As for HDMI cables, I don't have experience with those.

Adam

 

[MatthewB.]

With speakerwire you want to go thicker (thicker is better) You want between 12 guage and 16 gauge the smaller the number the larger the thickness. I also recommend buying banana plugs for each end of the speaker cable, it helps with ease of connection, controlling stray wires which can wreck havoc on your recievers amplifier if they accidently touch. and give you a minimum 8 point or more connection points as compared to two with bare wire.

Any HDMI cable will work and Blue Jean is a fantastic choice and very reasoably priced. Don't believe that Monster Cable crapola about Ultra and faster bandwidth speed, a cable cannot alter the speed of digital transmissions in any way shape or form and Gold connectors also don't help, it's just a cable to transfer 1's and 0's and gold won't change that in any way.

HDMI will transfer both audio and video signals along one cable, so you will need a HDMI from each device that needs it (Sat/Cable), Bluray, Game system. and then one more cable from the recievers HDMI out to the LCD's In.

 

[Exit]

You can get HDMI and other cables such as optical from monoprice.com for low prices and they work well. You need standard HDMI cables with male connectors on each end of whatever length you need.